Chapter 22 Contentious Cousins #2
He was already rounding the corner when the next speaker’s words scraped across his nerves and prompted him to pull Reiko the slightest bit closer. Adele was in the fucking room with them. Of course she was.
“How about I put on a fresh pot of tea?” Her voice was as unassuming as always. Calm, gentle, implicitly submissive, and entirely full of bullshit.
Santino heaved a mental breath and projected his voice before any of the bodies not facing the doorway could notice him and his beautiful companion leading a charge of six armed men into the room. “No one’s going to need any tea for a bit, I’m afraid.”
Adele pivoted where she stood, her shoulder-length brown hair flaring over her shoulders and one heel clacking loudly on the hardwood floor to catch her suddenly re-balanced weight.
Her eyes were wide, darting between him, Reiko, and the men he could feel moving into the room at his back, before returning to his.
Mamma twisted in her seat, her eyes also widening. Surprise melted into poorly disguised suspicion as her gaze shifted from him for too many seconds. “Santino, who—”
Nonno pushed to his feet from the chair he’d pulled up beside the angled, raised hospital bed where Zia Lorenza lay, her head rolled in Santino’s direction. “What is the meaning of this?”
It was the sight of Zia Lorenza’s sunken, tired eyes that hurt Santino’s heart in the moment.
He would vastly have preferred to do this without her.
On a good day, she was capable of holding conversation for an hour or so.
If she was guilty of more than venting a frustration on the wrong shoulder, he’d be shocked.
But he couldn’t think about any of that. Instead, he slid his stare around the room until he was holding his grandfather’s gaze.
Nonno took that as a cue to resume yelling as best he was capable. “I explicitly told you—”
“Nonno. Respectfully, sit the fuck down and shut up.” He watched shock drain the color from his grandfather’s face, and even his mother’s.
Something else crossed Adele’s quietly tightening expression.
“You don’t give the orders anymore, Old Man, and we don’t have the luxury of catering to your pride today.
You disobeyed your boss. You’ve put yourself and my mother in harm’s way, and I’m fucking pissed about it.
” Santino’s voice tightened in a way he’d never directed at his elder before. “Now sit. The fuck. Down.”
Zia shifted on her bed, trying to prop herself up more than the bed’s incline allowed. “What’s—” Her voice was a strained gasp, worsened and emphasized by the tubes attached to her nose.
Santino slid his gaze to her and relaxed his eyes marginally.
“My deepest apologies, Zia. We’ll take this to another room.
” It would be far easier for the group of them to move than for someone to move her, and forcing her to watch what was about to happen to her daughter—her last living child—was too cruel to ask.
He turned his attention where he needed and locked his eyes on Adele, who’d dipped her chin to assure they couldn’t make eye-contact.
She’d also taken a much subtler step backward, as if she thought she could vanish through a wall if only she could reach one.
Her hands were folded and unclenched in front of her waist, exactly how Santino would have expected them to be any other time.
She’d never once shown an interested in discussion surrounding the family business, let alone openly interjected herself.
“Adele,” Santino greeted, his tone cold. “Let’s not play games. You’ve nowhere to run and I’m not in the mood to chase.”
She lifted her head slowly, her brow creased. “I don’t understand.”
Santino clicked his tongue. “There’s a nice, open sitting room down the hall. Why don’t we reconvene there and let our elders have their peace, shall we?” He sidestepped, making sure she had no direct line to Reiko, and indicated the door they’d just come through.
Of course, his mother made a sound of protest. “Santino, what’s going on? What is all this?”
He struggled to keep from glaring at her. “Mamma,” he said sharply. “I’m angry with you, too. You knew better.” He barely looked away from Adele while he spoke, but if he were in a clearer headspace, he’d have known the words were wrong.
“Angry? Why? Tell me what I did—”
His stare snapped back to hers before she could do more than stand.
“I gave you two choices. Very specific choices. Neither of them involved taking Nonno on a joyride and willfully violating my orders. Yet here you are, enabling your father’s stubborn pride and proving you can’t take orders from your son.
When I said to sit down and shut up, I was speaking to both of you. ”
She clapped a hand to her chest in predictable dramatic fashion and her mouth opened.
Adele sprinted forward, like a stalking beast finally moving to strike its prey. Except her prey wasn’t whom Santino would have expected. She didn’t come for him, or Reiko. She went for Corinna. She went for his mother.
Santino wasn’t even sure it was Nonno whose stilted gasp split the air, only that he felt his own heart jump to his throat.
His cousin moved with a fierce precision he’d never imagined she possessed until she had his mother on her knees, a knife at her throat and her hair twisted in one hand.
The move was so efficient she couldn’t possibly have done it by instinct alone, and certainly not by luck.
Adele had been training for this, somewhere secret. This rebellion of hers—or theirs—wasn’t as sudden as merely being angry about helping a few Russians in Chicago. That had been a conveniently timed excuse to rally some more men to their cause at best.
Mamma let out a startled yelp, her hands frozen halfway to the arm that held the knife at her neck and her eyes wide with panic, confusion, and flickers of fear.
It’d been years since she’d come so close to the dangers of their world.
Nonno had worked very hard to shelter his daughters, and he’d doubled down where Mamma was concerned when Santino had been just a toddler.
Even as a grown woman, she was a spoiled princess in too many ways. “Wh-what is—Dell? Adele?”
Anger or not, the hurt in his mother’s voice stabbed at Santino’s heart.
Reiko laced her fingers with his as if she’d felt the same pain. Or perhaps she was reminding him he wasn’t facing the enemy on his own. Or, hell, maybe she was scared. It wouldn’t have been unreasonable.
“Adele,” Zia Lorenza wheezed in the next heartbeat of silence, a lecture laced with the shock in what remained of her voice. “Don’t…”
Adele cut a quick glance over her shoulder and spoke in startlingly abrasive Italian.
“Save your breath, mother.” Her glare returned to Santino, the knife at Corinna’s throat unwavering, and continued in Italian.
“You killed my brother last night, and we’re just supposed to welcome you with open arms?
I ought to spill some of your blood to even us out. ”
Behind Adele, Nonno sat frozen, suddenly every bit the ailing and elderly man he was with no sign of the once-fearsome mafia Boss he’d been. Only echoes of his pride remained.
It was that same pride, and undoubtedly the ever-present guilt at the years he hadn’t been such a good father to Zia Lorenza, that had put him and Santino’s mother in their current predicaments.
Maybe he was coming to see that, maybe not.
Santino only hoped he would hold himself in check long enough for the knife to move away from Mamma’s throat.
Reiko’s arm trembled for a jarring moment, and then her voice whispered like the rumble preceding an avalanche through the room. “That was definitely the voice I heard shouting at Danilo while I was hogtied last night.”
Santino exhaled slowly. He’d already received the proof, but her declaration would still carry weight—particularly in light of the statement he’d made sure their arrival had made.
Nonno’s head shook, but Santino couldn’t see his expression.
Nor did he care.
Santino held Adele’s glare and spoke in English. “I don’t need your confession, Adele. I have more evidence than I would ever bother collecting for most people.”
“You have no evidence of anything,” Adele said, her voice a hiss. “Who would put stock in the words of your little trash whore? It won’t be sticking around.”
Santino felt his head tilt to one side as the anger settled into his blood. The room came into sharper focus and he had to consciously keep himself from clenching his fists until his knuckles cracked. “I beg your pardon?”
Adele raised her chin. “In fact, you should be. Begging, that is. Don’t forget who’s holding the knife here.”
The heart monitor’s cadence increased and Zia sucked in a hard breath. “Stop this!” She attempted to twist sideways and fell swiftly into a gasping coughing fit.
Nonno moved as fast as his body ever let him, grabbing up her water and half shoving it at her in a manner that had liquid sloshing over the sides of the cup.
Santino watched all of that in his peripheral, never fully taking his focus from Adele. “Don’t you see what you’re doing? You may as well have both our mothers by the throat. I’d prefer we leave them out of this, wouldn’t you?”
Adele’s eyes narrowed. “I don’t care what you’d ‘prefer’. Would you like to know what I’d prefer?”
Santino slipped on a placating smile. “I mostly just want to know what will motivate you to release my mother without slitting her throat. We’re not here for therapy, cousin.” But they were sure as fuck going to end up causing a need for some, unfortunately.
Adele let out a huff of a laugh, her lips twisting into a cruel smile Santino could never have imagined on her face. “Maybe the answer is nothing. Maybe I hate this whiny little princess-bitch for everything she’s taken from me!”
Mamma made a sound of confusion, her head tipped back as she tried to stare up at Adele.
Adele’s arm tensed, the knife tilting as she prepared to slice.
Guns lifted in Santino’s periphery.
Nonno stepped up behind Adele, and she froze again.
Mamma’s hair slipped from her slackened grip, though her knife held—with a faint tremble.
Sadness darkened what Santino could see of Nonno’s expression, and when his grandfather spoke, his gravelly voice shook.
“There’s air in this needle, Dell. And I’m not so old I can’t compress my thumb. ”
Adele’s brow pinched, a different kind of pain blending with the open anger on her face. “Always”—she straightened her arm, releasing Mamma from the threat of the knife—“still, always, you choose her.”
Armando swept forward and helped rush Santino’s mother off the floor and out of Adele’s range.
“Stupid girl,” Nonno muttered in Italian as he took a step back.
Adele let out a screech and twisted around, the blade spinning in her hand. There was no way she would miss.
Santino leapt forward anyway. One of the women screamed.
Maybe more than one. He heard the tell-tale grunting of impact, saw blood spray the air, and finally latched his hand around something attached to his target.
“Adele!” He ripped Adele away from his grandfather, barely remembering the safest direction to throw her, and barked orders over his shoulder for someone to get the in-house medic.
For once he was glad Zia Lorenza required them.
Commotion exploded then, with shouting in multiple languages an annoying backdrop as Santino stalked closer to the scampering and suddenly unarmed figure of his last remaining cousin. Later, perhaps, he’d dwell a little on how regrettable it was he’d been forced to kill two of the three.
In the moment, letting her live was the only kind of regret he could comprehend.
“We-we’re family!” Adele cried when her back quite literally hit the wall. She used it to pull herself up to her feet, seemingly too scared to take her eyes off him. He certainly hadn’t broken her yet.
A familiar coldness washed over him. “Didn’t seem to matter five seconds ago,” Santino said. “Or last night, when you helped your brother kidnap my fiancée and hold her hostage. When you sent me those nasty, taunting texts.”
Adele’s eyes widened, but her pupils didn’t respond. The action was calculated. “Your—” Her lip curled in a sneer she couldn’t seem to control and she didn’t repeat the word. “It’s bad enough we were shoved aside for you. Now you’re going to give our fortune and our blood to that?”
Santino let all pretense of amusement drain from him. “That’s the second time you’ve referred to her like she’s something subhuman. To say nothing for the disrespect of everything you did yesterday.”
Adele turned her head and spit the way a man might, then raised her chin. “At least Danilo had the sense to marry and breed with Italians, regardless of where he spent his nights. That is why he would have been a better Boss than you.”
“I’m starting to see why no one ever snatched you up,” Santino returned.
The jibe hit and her jaw clenched. But he wasn’t interested in banter.
“We’re going to take this outside, Adele.
And you’re going to pray to whatever devil has accepted you under their sign that your soul finds redemption or the torture chamber is at max-capacity, because it’s over. You’ve crossed too many lines.”
He tried not to hear the crying behind him, or the concerningly accelerated rate of the heart monitor.
Adele turned her gaze past him as if she thought their audience was her weapon. “You hear this? He’ll kill me for some stupid slight against a whore—”
Santino curled his hand around her throat and shoved her back against the wall she’d previously used for leverage. “I’ll kill you,” he snarled, “for every slight. Against my bride. Against me. Against this entire family to which you once belonged.”
Her eyes glinted at him as her lips lifted with a smug smile. “Every slight?” She coughed in an effort to clear her throat, despite that what ailed her was external. “Again, you’ll fail, dear cousin. You’ve not uncovered them all.”
Santino scowled, but it was his mother who spoke up over the lowered cacophony of emotional distress.
“I know,” she said, tears thickening her voice. “Lo told me, years ago. I know what you did, Dell. You and Danilo.”
Adele cut her eyes in Mamma’s direction, though she surely couldn’t see past Santino with him looming over her. Shock and true fear had hold of her, though. The honest expressions were as different from the false as night and day.
Mamma sniffled. “I’m sorry, Lo. I can’t keep the secret anymore.”
Santino turned his head enough to project his voice. “What secret, Mamma? What did they do?”
“Noemi’s not missing, Tino,” Mamma said, her voice choked. “She’s dead.”